Jonathan may not have one weird trick for being a successful academic but I do: make very limited plans for what you can say in any conference presentation. In order to be sure to get into the MLA and LASA, I used to write these paper proposals which were really book proposals. Then they were impossible to write as conference papers or articles, and I did not realize it was because they were books.
I could discuss a 500-word abstract in 20 minutes and be brilliant, or write a 2000-word piece of the alleged article; I am always a good presenter. I thought then that not finishing the written versions, not bringing them to conclusion, was “procrastination.” But it was because my abstracts were actually proposals for whole books I wanted to write; my problem was not giving myself enough space and time.
(As I have said before, that is why, when people say that if you are not writing well, you should just put an alarm clock on, I have visions of breaking their alarm clocks over their obviously vacant heads.)
In any case, I would emit these abstracts from my left hand while with my right, I tried to “cut corners” (how I dislike that phrase) on everything so as to write books in which I did not believe, but which I had been assigned and had also had numerous threats made around: you must say this, you must not say that; if you do and say as you see fit, it will be the end of you.
Now, instead, I do as I see fit. This makes it as easy to organize time as it was back when I was in school, before I became a professor and had to receive all the ruinous career orders I did. When I was an undergraduate and gave 20-minute presentations, I always kept in mind how little you could say in that time. I would plan to say, or suggest explanations for only two or three things.
I would also choose a presentation topic that was a small part of my general topic for the term, which I could do since I would have chosen interrelated classes on an issue in which I had an interest. In that spirit, here is my very limited LASA proposal:
Race Beyond Exceptionalism
Mestizaje is a key justification of cultural exceptionalism in Latin America. As foundational myth it has often served to limit the analysis of race and racisms, in the social sciences as well as the literary field. Is it possible to consider questions of race, or race and culture, without taking recourse in exceptionalist logics? This paper considers that question in light of the work of ethicist Denise Ferreira da Silva, author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) and other writings on race and racism. According to da Silva, mestizaje is the process that produces the recognizable, yet subordinate racial “other” on whose ground the modern subject is sustained. For this reason mestizaje is precisely not “exceptional” in global processes. In order to analyze race beyond exceptionalism, we must also think outside coloniality/modernity (Mignolo), and consider decolonial options.
I was going to have a second paragraph, claiming I would say more, because I kan ikke være bekendt til, at give a paper in an international conference that is really only a couple of book reports, now, can I? Had I written that paragraph, though, it would have made speculative claims and promised research I have not yet done. So I resisted, recognizing that this paragraph in fact promises more than a couple of book reviews.
Now, in fact, I have something to expand it with: Trouillot’s 2002 essay on North Atlantic universals, or analytical fictions from 1492 to 1945. This paper actually leads to Trouillot and de Certeau. A question: is Latin American exceptionalism fueled by the fact that the modernity refuses to recognize coloniality? Is exceptionalism a half-blind attempt to speak from that situation? Trouillot, 850-851:
Modernity is structurally plural inasmuch as it requires a heterology, an Other outside of itself. The modern is also historically plural because it always requires an Other from within, the otherwise modern, created between the jaws of modernity and modernization.
Coda: we must note as well that as many point out, slavery is not a flaw in modernity or capitalism or liberalism but key in it, and it is necessary to keep the global flows of goods and capital moving.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Further expansion: check out Wikipedia quotations of Anibal Quijano (and don’t say this is not research, it is).
From “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”, p. 542:
The Eurocentric vision is based on two principal founding myths: first, the idea of the history of human civilization as a trajectory that departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe; second, a view of the differences between Europe and non-Europeans as natural (racial) differences and not consequences of a history of power. Both myths can be unequivocally recognized in the foundations of evolutionism and dualism, two of the nuclear elements of Eurocentrism.
From “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” (2010), p. 22, in Globalization and the Decolonial Option, ed. by Walter Mignolo & Árturo Escobar:
[T]hat specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial,’ ‘ethnic,’ ‘anthropological,’ or ‘national,’ according to the times, agents and populations involved. These intersubjective constructions, product of Eurocentred colonial domination, were even assumed to be ‘objective,’ ‘scientific’ categories, then of a historical significance. That is, as natural phenomena, not referring to the history of power. This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations of classes and estates.
The one time I gave a conference paper I fell right into that trap. My subject was 19th Century sentimental/domestic literature, and I tried to discuss three novels and draw conclusions about woman’s place vs. men’s in the 19th century.
That’s a book! Or maybe several books!
So it is da Silva plus Mignolo plus Trouillot plus de Certeau plus Quijano.
All these discussions about Latin American specificity are really about the Creole dilemma: Creoles of southern European descent appeared toward the end of the 17th century, located between the true humans (Europeans) and almost non-humans (Indians, Africans). They, too, were left out of history. Here we have the dilemma of the Latin American Creole classes: they inhabit this space in between, looking at themselves from the European as non-beings and yet also aspirants to being.
They are fighting for their space and since part of them wants to join the winning side they do not see that race is a world system and that it has to do with colonialism, and that try though they may to join modernity, coloniality is only going to increase.
I am revealing myself as a complete Mignolean and I did not know it.
That’s funny because my conference presentation for LASA will be a book at some point.
And will rock!